Strange weather pattern!

May 14

There is huge contrast in the weather today. A southerly flow aloft (about the fifth day in row) is bringing extremely variable conditions this afternoon. At 3 pm today (May 14, 2011) it is currently 7 degrees and raining at Quesnel and 24 and sunny at Blue River! A disturbance embedded in the flow is responsible for the thicker cloud and rain. The clouds seem to be channelling up the Fraser. To the west over the Chilcotin, it is cloudy but dry with temps in the mid teens. The reason for the very warm conditions in Blue River is due to downslope winds coming from the east. Tomorrow it looks like a rapid rise in temperatures in the Cariboo northward through the Central Interior as a ridge of high pressure extending from Alberta builds westward. The warm weather shifts northward on Monday with more rain speading to southern and central BC as yet another disturbance moves up from the south!

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Comments

Chris

May 14th, 2011 at 3:52 PM

I wish our public forecasts had “confidence levels”. People cancelled a club hiking trip today and the weather was perfectly fine here most of the day. Southerly flows with moisture coming up over the landmass are not to be trusted. “Rain” was the forecast for tomorrow…. based on prog QPF i suppose, but it all looks like instability to me… Would rather say “showers” (though I havent looked at any tephis) I guess we’ll have to see.
rpigott

May 14th, 2011 at 6:42 PM

Hi Chris…Env Canada’s forecasts were horrendously bad for the Central Interior today. This morning’s forecast for the Cariboo called for highs of 21. Quesnel and Williams Lake never got above 10 and they had quite a bit of rain that wasn’t forecast! They finally amended around 2 pm which was much too late. Of course they were using Scribe without using their brains to see what was really happening. Tons of lightning down in Oregon and Washington today…a tad unusual for May.
Jim Goosen

June 29th, 2011 at 10:33 AM

I just checked back to see what our forecasts were. The 4pm forecast on the 13th was a 60% chance of showers for the 14th while Scribe (131200Z REG) had only 30% for YQZ (QPF was just to the west). The 5am forecast lowered the POP to 30% while Scribe (14000Z REG) had 30% only for YQZ. The 12Z REG QPF shifted slightly to the east so it was now over YQZ and YWL. Scribe now had rain for YQZ and no POP for YWL. PSPC amended the Cariboo forecast at 8:27am for showers and lowered the high to 18 (Scribe had 21). The 11am forecast didn’t change. An amendment at 1:56pm lowered the temp to 15 or 16.

PSPC was better than Scribe and issued a quick amendment for precip but was always too warm with the highs. It was definitely a challenging forecast. Meanwhile, I was in Turkey contending with weather challenges there.
rpigott

June 29th, 2011 at 10:53 AM

Looking back, I was too hard on Environment Canada’s forecasters but at the time I just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t amend the forecast earlier and when they did it was only a subtle change.
Jim goosen

June 29th, 2011 at 2:24 PM

The change (at 8:27am) in POP was significant (from 30 to >=80) but the temperature change was minor. The amendment could have been sent earlier but the forecaster was likely busy doing the convective analysis.